Is DIY Dead? (Redux)

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A few months back, I wrote about my fears that the ability to build your own PC might become a thing of the past. This created quite a stir in the ExtremeTech forums and even received play elsewhere on the Net.

I still have those concerns. Today’s tech economy is beginning to resemble an aging sports star yearning for past glories. Consolidation is occurring at a rapid pace, and the only segment of the PC market that’s actively growing is the mobile market. In fact, the ultralight (one spindle) and thin-and-light (two spindle) machines are the fastest-growing categories in the mobile market. You certainly can’t build your own one-spindle notebook PC today.

However, when I was attending Comdex, in Las Vegas, recently, I had some encounters that made me feel good about the future of DIY. Curiously, these encounters didn’t occur inside the halls of Comdex, nor in the suites and private showrooms in the hotels on the strip. Instead, these encounters occurred in taxi cabs.

Cabbies Do DIYThe taxi situation was quite different at Comdex this year. In past years, attendees would sometimes have to wait 30 or 45 minutes or more to get a cab. This year, the cab drivers had to wait for rides. Some Comdex visitors simply saw this as justice for past Comdex cab waits. It proved to be an interesting opportunity, because cab drivers this year seemed much more amenable to conversation. And since cabs didn’t have to be shared as frequently, I was often alone.

It’s true that many of the discussions were pretty banal. Some cab drivers were disgruntled at having to wait for riders. Others were concerned about the airline crash in New York City, seeing it as another potential hit on the Las Vegas economy. But it was Wednesday, the day I flew out, that two interesting revelations occurred.

I had just left the Las Vegas Convention Center, heading back to the Hard Rock Hotel. I had to pick up my luggage before sallying off to the airport for the return flight. The cab driver was a retiree who was driving a cab for some extra cash. He sported a baseball cap on top of a full head of white hair and large, fairly thick glasses. He asked me, “What looks interesting this year?”

I talked about PDAs, fast 3D graphics and flat panel displays. At this last item, his ears perked up. “How much do they cost?”

I told him that flat panels were getting pretty inexpensive, but a 17″ panel would still cost around $800. He shook his head. “That’s still too expensive. I’ll be interested when they get down to $300.”

I mentioned that you could actually find some 15″ panels for under $300. He snorted. “I bought my 21″ monitor for $280.”

Curious, I asked him if it was new. “Yep, brand new.”

I asked him the brand name. He couldn’t remember, but allowed that it wasn’t one of the leading brands. He had bought it at a traveling computer swap meet that apparently arrives in Las Vegas once a month or so. “Yep, I built my own PC,” he said proudly. “And I build them for other people, too.”

It turned out that he had learned the basics of PC hardware and repair at the local community college. Most of the PCs he built were for friends, family and “FoF’s”, and were typically Pentium IIIs with integrated graphics. Most of these folks wanted to do Internet surfing and email, so it wasn’t like they needed GeForce 3’s and Athlon XPs.

“I sure hate surfing the net over my phone line, though,” he said. “But that cable service is too expensive”. Apparently, his local cable provider will only supply broadband data services if he also subscribed to cable TV (which he didn’t), so the monthly cost was well over the $40 of basic cable modem service.

At that point we arrived at the hotel. I hopped out after paying the driver, and giving him a generous tip, as much for the interesting conversation as the ride. After gathering up my luggage, I caught another cab.

The next cabbie was a woman, who appeared to be in her mid-50’s. She was whipcord thin, looked very fit, and had a tattoo on her shoulder. (I only know about the tattoo because of the picture on her dashboard of the driver and her dog.) She asked about Comdex attendance, and mentioned that she was originally going to go today, but had to work instead. She even had a Comdex attendee badge hanging from the rear view mirror.

We also talked about CES. Then she began talking about how she had built her own PC. I did a double-take and had this sudden vision of cab drivers selling PCs out of the back of their cabs. Like the earlier driver, she had learned a bit by taking community college classes, but had also done a lot of reading. “I used an ABIT motherboard”, she said proudly, “with an AMD Duron, in an Antec case.”

It was a good thing she wasn’t looking in her rear view mirror as I carefully lifted my jaw up from the cab floor. She continued, “I like those AMD CPUs”, she said. “I also heard that ASUS makes good motherboards, too.”

At this point, we were starting to pull into the terminal. As I paid her, I told her about ExtremeTech. She sounded pretty excited, so we may have a new reader soon.

What Does It Mean?You can look at this two ways:

Building your own PC has become a mainstream activity.

The integration of PC hardware has begun.

Both of these statements have some truth, though it’s not quite to the point where my brother-in-law builds his own PCs yet. The implication of the second point is that building your own PC may become a marginalized activity sooner than I thought. Let me explain.

The last time I bought an off-the-shelf PC was in 1988. It was a 20MHz 386 with a 40MB (that’s “megabytes”) hard drive and a fast VGA card. The hard drive controller was an MFM controller that plugged into the ISA slot.

A few months later, I had a bunch of parts scattered over my kitchen table as I made my first attempt to update a PC. Here’s a capsule summary of the things you needed to know:

Which disk drive technology did you want to use? Today, you can add SCSI (or buy it integrated on some workstation/server motherboards at a hefty price premium), but that’s about it. Back then, you had the choice between MFM, RLL and SCSI–IDE didn’t exist, and no hard drive controller was integrated on the motherboard.

Choose your graphics card carefully. For gaming, at least, that was actually more critical in the past than it is today. If you pick up a Radeon 7500 today, for example, you can “only” run games at 40-60 fps (or more). Back then, picking the wrong VGA card meant many games were simply unplayable. Matrox learned this the hard way, trying to break into the consumer space with Windows accelerators that had unbelievably bad VGA performance. (But later, they redeemed themselves with the Millenium.) Also, if the card had poor VESA compatibility, you could kiss high resolution (meaning 640×480) gaming goodbye.

What CPU do you use? There’s a lot of argument in the ExtremeTech forums about this, but back a few years, it was actually more critical. Today, if you get an Athlon XP or a fast P4, you’ll get good performance. People argue about cycles per instruction, execution efficiency and other issues, but the bottom line is that current processors are (mostly) fast enough for most applications–even games. The Athlon XP is a better value for a lot of people, because it costs less at the same performance level. But back a few years, if you chose the wrong CPU (486SX, anyone?), you were stuck with poor performance in some applications. Even before the 486SX, I recall adding a 387 coprocessor so I could play Falcon 3.0 with fast frame rates.

Components were much more sensitive to static electricity than today. To this day, I wince when I see young techs walking around with graphics cards or even CPUs in their bare hands across carpeted floors. In fact, ESD (electrostatic discharge) is still a problem, but not nearly as severe a problem as it was ten years ago. It was possible to fry a memory module even if you were grounded.

At one point, you had to worry about the type of expansion slots. There were ISA, EISA, Microchannel, PCI and VL Bus (VESA local bus)slots, all existing at the same time, all vying for your attention. I recall buying motherboards with multiple VL Bus slots so I could have a VLB SCSI controller and VLB graphics card. Intel (and the PCI SIG) finally won out with the PCI standard, but there was a time when it wasn’t so certain.

Setting up networks was painful. I still recall getting small networks up and running to play Doom. You had to set up the configuration files carefully; some network drivers weren’t compatible with applications that freed up lower memory (remember QEMM?). Even when you set up things perfectly, you couldn’t connect. And woe be to him who played Doom 1.0 on a corporate network; the flood of broadcast data packets would bring the wrath of the network administrator (and every other user on the network) down on your head–worse than cacodemons.

Floppy disks were in transition. If you wanted to do it right, you had to have both a 3.5″ floppy drive and a 5.25″, 1.2MB floppy drive. Some games only shipped on one floppy type or the other.

Even buying an off-the-shelf PC was an exercise in frustration. Some PCs with cool technology were mostly incompatible with games or some mainstream applications (the HP 150 comes to mind). Others were marginally compatible, meaning that some games would run and others wouldn’t. DirectX is a gamers dream by comparison. I recall carrying around Flight Simulator floppies–if Flight Simulator could run, most other games would, too.

The Future is NowI could probably go on longer, but you get the drift. Let’s contrast the situation to today’s DIY world

Motherboards are highly integrated. For most users, most of their PCI slots go unused. Almost no one chooses anything but IDE drives these days. You can even get RAID on the motherboard at little additional cost.

Integrated audio on the motherboard is getting more sophisticate. Even before Nvidia’s ambitious MCP-D chip, several companies were adding low-cost, but flexible C-Media PCI audio chips onto the motherboard.

More motherboards now have integrated Ethernet ports.

You no longer have to worry about adding cards for parallel, serial or mice. In fact, those ports are used less and less, as printers, keyboards and other I/O move to USB.

Despite core logic differences, most core logic supports the same set of standards, even across different CPU types. Whether you have Intel or AMD, you also have PCI, AGP, ATA100, USB 1.1, etc.

It’s much easier to physically install a motherboard. While the I/O back plate can sometimes vary, it’s a far cry from the past, when you sometimes had to mate the motherboard to a specific case. Even so-called baby AT motherboards didn’t always fit in cases that supported the baby AT form factor.

So the massive integration I worried about in my first DIY column is actually happening today. We’re at a transition point where the added integration, while removing choices, also makes building your own PC much easier. It’s a small step, though, from a highly integrated motherboard to a highly integrated, sealed box. Even today, the fastest growing segment of the PC hardware business (perhaps the only segment that’s actually growing) are mobile PCs, which are, in fact, highly integrated, sealed devices.

Still, all this integration does serve to reduce costs, and as long as it’s profitable for motherboard companies to sell to end users, you’ll still be building PCs in the near term, at least.

I’m beginning to believe, though, that this reduction in choice is causing people to be even more passionate about the choices they have left. A great example is the heated debates about CPU choices. After all, motherboards are pretty similar, there’s only a couple of graphics chip vendors left, and the add-in sound card market is slowly fading. On the other hand, the external choices are broadening. There seems to be a host of multichannel speaker choices, external storage devices, oddball game controllers, digital imaging devices and amazing color printers. I was recently quite taken aback by a heated debate over mouse pads

In the end, building your own PC will no doubt be a mainstay of technology enthusiasts and hobbyists for some time to come. But the huge numbers of people who are building their own PCs can thank the increased integration that makes the DIY process much easier and considerably cheaper than a few years ago. Of course, new standards are emerging that will affect our choices in the future, such as USB 2.0, 3GIO, AGP 8x and others.